07 January 2007

Missed about a month of racing due to illness and work. Finally got my fitness back up to a semirespectable level. The tradeoff with doing the short races on Sundays is that one has to decide if one is going to try to do well and taper a bit and let fitness fade a bit by passing up the opportunity to ride hard on Saturday or just keep training to raise or maintain fitness.

For some reason my shoulder that was sort of bothering me on Saturday was really bothering me by the time I got to Monterey but since I had driven that far I figured I had to ride. It only hurt when I used my left arm so if I fell, I would try to roll on the good shoulder...

The course was changed a little bit with more hairpin turns added and full road closure on the road bit. Even though it was hilly, the longest one only took about thirty to forty seconds so it felt like a fast course.

Managed to bend the inner chainring during my last warmup lap so decided to do the race with just the big ring. Probably could have used a small ring but this really only hurt the last two times on the biggest hill.

Slotted in at about eleventh of thirteen on the first climb and fought off Mike for two laps and then he just rode away from me on the parts where one had to brake, just like on the road ride the day before!

Salvaged a 12/13 on the day with the threat of being lapped in the last lap motivating me a little bit, and 14/46 overall for the series. Afterwards, did the MTB trails around Fort Ord then did a lap on the Fort Ord road race course. For a non local, Fort Ord roads are pretty neat because most of it was closed to cars so one only sees hikers and other bike riders on the roads.

Power seems kind of low, freshness and snap not there due to burning a lot of matches trying to hold Rob, Filip and DiskZero's wheel on Saturday. ATL: 127CTL: 112TSB: -14Pavg: 172Pnorm: 201H: 171C: 78S: 21.1T: 46:27D: 16.3 km